I'm by no means an expert in this, and maybe it's a bit obvious, but hadn't seen this mentioned yet.
I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs.
Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains.
The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads.
The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages.
I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads.
I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.)
If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal.
I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like.
It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.
I think as we run out of gains to be had from process size reductions, the next frontier for cloud providers is in custom silicon for specific workloads. First we saw GPUs move to the cloud, then Google announced their TPUs.
Behind the scenes, Amazon's acquisition of Annapurna Labs has been paying off with their Nitro (http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtuali...) ASIC, nearly eliminating the virtualization tax, and providing a ton of impressive network capabilities and performance gains.
The Graviton, which I believe also came from the Annapurna team, is likely just the start. Though a general purpose CPU, it's getting AWS started on custom silicon. AWS seems all about providing their customers with a million different options to micro-optimize things. I think the next step will be an expanding portfolio of hardware for specific workloads.
The more scale AWS has, the more it makes sense to cater to somewhat niche needs. Their scale will enable customization of hardware to serve many different workloads and is going to be yet another of Amazon's long-term competitive advantages.
I think that will show up in two ways. Hardware narrowly focused on certain workloads, like Google's TPUs that show really high performance, and general purpose CPUs like these Gravitons that are more cost efficent for some workloads.
I see echoes of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi that lead to the development of the A series CPUs. My iPhone XS beats my MacBook (early 2016) on multi-core Geekbench by 37%. (And on single core, it's only 10% slower than a 2018 MacBook Pro 15.)
If Amazon is able to have similar success in custom silicon, this will be a big deal.
I think early next year we'll test the a1 instances for some of our stateless work loads and see what the price/performance really looks like.
It does make me worry that this sort of thing will cement the dominance of large cloud providers, and we'll be left with only a handful (3?) of real competitors.